Macaulay Culkin teams with Angry Video Game Nerd to dump on Home Alone

Angry Video Game Nerd struggled for a theme of games to crap on this week, and elected to go with that old-timey holiday classic, the line of execrable Home Alone adaptations. The real news is the guest star helping him excrete all over them.

Yes, that’s Macaulay Culkin cosplaying the pizza guy from the first Home Alone (a role played by Dan Charles Zukowski, whose other major roles were as an extra on Saved By the Bell.) In between hammy gags about being an unrecognizable has-been child star, he and Nerd (James Rolfe) go through the library of Home Alone and Home Alone 2 adaptations.

These include a WTF PlayStation 2 adaptation from 2006 that launched only in Europe and seemed not to have any of the name-image-and-likeness rights for the stars of the 1990 flick. Most of the time is spent on the Nintendo, Super Nintendo and Game Boy versions. (Game Boy: “It’s kind of like switching from getting kicked in the balls with steel-toed boots to soccer cleats; both fuckin’ suck, but one sucks worse.”)

This of course overwhelms Culkin, who finally drops the hacky pizza boy portrayal and gets with the program around nine minutes in. The rest of the vid is Culkin and Rolfe doing what the show does best, crapping on the absurdity of the 16-bit era’s licensed schlock, when developers had to contrive all sorts of platforming bullshit to cash in on a popular movie whose story has no sensible video game application otherwise. And yes, it all builds to Culkin reaching for some hideous metaphors about how traumatized all these assy games make him feel, comments that should be awesomely self-incriminating out of context.

Home Alone’s best appearance in a video game, in the 28 years since it premiered, was when Hitmanplayers got to kill two imbeciles based on Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern’s dipshit burglars, for a Christmas mission at the end of 2016. Officially speaking, Home Alone was adapted for Nintendo Entertainment System in October 1991, then for the Super Nintendo, Game Boy, Sega Genesis and Game Gear, PC and Commodore Amiga over the next three months. Home Alone 2 went the same route a year later (but no Amiga port).

Out of nowhere, video game historian Frank Cifaldi found the source code for Home Alone 2 on the NES back in 2016 and still has it available, if you’re interested in that. “It was built on top of the Simpsons games,” he explained at the time.